This detailed guide covers the creation of connections to a MySQL database with PHP 5 via a custom Ajax engine and shows how to gracefully format the response with CSS, JavaScript, and XHTML while keeping the data tightly secure. It also covers the use of four custom Ajax-enabled components in an application and how to create each of them from scratch.

The final section of the book combines the individual code examples and techniques from earlier chapters of the book into one larger, Ajax-driven application–an internal web mail application that can be used in any user-based application, such as a community-based web application. Readers will learn not only how to create and use their own reusable Ajax components in this application